Yoram Reuben Hazony (born 1964) is an Israeli-American philosopher, Bible scholar, and political theorist. He is president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and serves as the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. He has argued for national conservatism in his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism and 2022's Conservatism: A Rediscovery.

Biography

Yoram Hazony was born in Rehovot, Israel, and moved with his family to Princeton, New Jersey, US. He was raised and educated in the United States and returned to live in Israel after finishing university. Hazony received his BA from Princeton University in East Asian studies in 1986 and his PhD from Rutgers University in political philosophy in 1993. While a junior at Princeton, he founded the Princeton Tory, a magazine for moderate and conservative thought. He is the brother of David Hazony and Daniel Hazony. He married Yael Fulton, an American whom he met at Princeton, and she moved to Israel with him. The couple live in Jerusalem and have nine children.

Academic and journalistic career

Hazony founded the Shalem Center in Jerusalem in 1994 and was president and then provost until 2012. He designed the curriculum for Shalem College, Israel's first liberal arts college, established in 2013. Hazony has served as director of the John Templeton Foundation's project in Jewish Philosophical Theology and as a member of the Israel Council for Higher Education committee examining general studies programs in Israel's universities and colleges. He authors a blog on philosophy, politics, Judaism, Israel, and higher education, called Jerusalem Letters. Hazony has published in outlets including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and American Affairs.

Religious and political views

Hazony is a Modern Orthodox Jew and relates his views on Open Orthodoxy in an article published in 2014. In it, he states that he fears that Open Orthodoxy is acting as an ideological echo chamber in which any unapproved views are ridiculed and quashed without debate. Hazony describes his concern that elements of Open Orthodoxy have seemingly decided to accept all conclusions of academic Bible critics as indisputable fact, without even going through the motions of investigating whether these conclusions are true. Hazony is an outspoken Judeo-nationalist and has written that nationalism uniquely provides "the collective right of a free people to rule themselves". However, several critics of Hazony's 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism, maintain it is both theoretically inconsistent or incoherent and that it bears little relation to the historical body of nationalist thought. In a review for the Tel Aviv Review of Books, Yair Wallach argues that Hazony's 2020 book, A Jewish State: Herzl and the Promise of Nationalism, is characterised by "intellectual dishonesty", in part for presenting a selective account of Theodor Herzl's understanding of Zionism and nationalism. Hazony organized and spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in England in May 2023. He told the event that the United Kingdom was plagued with woke "neo-Marxist" agitators who want to detach Britons from their entire past, and called for the return of military service.

Published works

Books Edited books Translated books